I love it when you sit on my face

By now you may have become so bored with the DemRep pep rallies that you might have scrolled down far enough in Google News to find the story about SPY Optic’s billboard scandal. In order to promote their new “Happy” brand of lenses, the North County company slapped up a billboard that said “SPY: Happy to Sit on Your Face.”

SPY is a huge supporter of grass roots cycling and bike racing, and makes performance products that are proudly worn by bikers everywhere. They also sponsor the amateur team I race for.

The day after it went up, Clear Channel Outdoors, the owner of the billboard, removed the sign under cover of darkness. Given Clear Channel’s corporate censorship policy, this is hardly surprising. They’re the same douchebags who censored a proposed billboard touting gay marriage in Clearwater, Florida, prior to the RNC’s gay-bashing hatefest. They’re the same First Amendment vandals who banned 150 songs with questionable lyrics after 9/11, including subversive ditties like Louis Armstrong’s ” What a Wonderful World” and terrorist compositions like Cat Stevens’s “Peace Train.”

But this isn’t about the growling, repressive, closeted impulses of a reactionary corporate media conglomerate. It’s about surfing and fucking.

Surfing and fucking

It seems that some of the good folk in Encinitas, California, where the sign went up, were dismayed at the sexual innuendo of the sign. They complained, because, you know, “sit on your face” implies cunnilingus, or maybe even sticking your nose and tongue up your date’s rear end.

How terrible. How filthy. How un-American. And most of all, how inappropriate for a good, clean, wholesome, family oriented coastal town.

These are all great grounds for outrage, unless, of course, you’ve actually been to Encinitas, which is the surf capital of the world. You can’t walk five feet down the main drag without seeing a zillion surfers and their smoking hot, barely clad surfer babes with taut nipples busting out of tight bikinis and buttfloss so deep in the crack that you’d need a spelunker to fish it out. Epic breaks like Cardiff and Swami’s, as well as dozens of other excellent waves in the vicinity make Encinitas an epicenter of surfing.

And unless you’ve been dead since the Beach Boys first released “Surfin’ U.S.A.” in 1963, surfing is all about riding waves, drinking beer, getting stoned, and fucking. Human nature being what it is, and naked bodies doing what drunk and stoned bodies naturally do, much of the surfer fucking is interspersed with face sitting.

A recent study showed that every single person over the age of 21 who has lived in Encinitas for more than a month has had their face covered by the naked ass and exposed genitalia of a spouse, neighbor, casual acquaintance, lifeguard, teacher, doctor, lawyer, fireman, cop, letter carrier, UPS delivery person, or Indian chief.

In other words, Encinitians, your complaints about the location of this risque ad are, shall we say, misplaced.

But what about the CHILDREN???

When I lived in Miami, Texas, I got to know the editor of a local newspaper called the Clarendon Enterprise. It was a radical, right-wing whackadoodle of a rag, and the editor’s favorite battle cry was “But what about the CHILDREN?”

A recalcitrant bachelor, he decried every liberal/socialist/communist attempt to regulate or govern in the name of helping children. School lunches, medical care, education, you name it, he opposed it, and frequently did so with witty and intelligent attacks on the Mommy State and its assumptions that parents were too stupid and inept to raise their own kids.

The undoing of his argument was first the fact that he lived in the Texas Panhandle, the teen pregnancy and teen meth capital of America, where parents really are, for the most part, too stupid to raise their own kids, and second, the fact that he eventually got married and had children, at which point he became an ardent advocate for government expenditures of tax dollars to raise, educate, and care for his own progeny.

In any event, one of the key complaints in Encinitas about the SPY billboard went like this: “What are you going to tell your kids when they pipe up in the back seat, ‘Mommy, what does that mean?'”

Why you really are too stupid to raise children

The assumption that any child in the 21st Century would be reading billboards rather than fiddling with a video game console in the SUV or playing games on his iPhone is of course absurd. The idea that your child isn’t already exposed to graphic sexual language and references on television is even more absurd.

But the kernel of truth is that you probably are unable to talk frankly with your children about sex, which is why they’re getting all of their lessons from the iPhone: the same device that speeds them funware also connects them to 24/7 lessons in cuntology and cocksmanship.

In sum, if your child really did ask you what the billboard meant, and you were unable to say, “It’s about sunglasses sitting on your face, honey, and making you happy,” or “It’s a play on words that implies two people having sex,” or “Ask your father,” then you’ve flunked the parenting test. Please return them at the counter, no questions asked, and get a pet iguana or rock in exchange.

Happiness is coming

Never easily dissuaded by prudes, SPY’s follow-up billboard says, again touting its Happy lenses, “Happiness is Coming.” The ad adds that the lenses, of course, will be “released” soon.

I’m sure this will set off another round of agonizing among the Mommy Class, i.e. those who have graduated from buttfloss to an expensive house by the sea. What it won’t do is bother the surfers and surfettes. They’ll be sitting on each others’ faces and coming just like they always have, while the rest of the world looks on in fond reminiscence and outright envy.

§ 14 Responses to I love it when you sit on my face

“According to a Patch readers’ poll, a majority thought the billboard was clever. The latest unscientific results showed that 69 percent liked the ad, 19 percent found it offensive, and 10 percent were indifferent.”

A follow up survey by Patch showed that among those who found it offensive, 100% had photos on their cell phone of someone sitting on their face and worked for Oakley. Of the 10% who were indifferent, 99.9% confessed that they had been sexually inactive since 1975, but admitted that they loved SPY shades and had a couple of pairs anyway.

You’re right about Oakley being behind the complaints. Oakley is tired of being licked by Spy in sales. Spy is eating Oakley’s market share. And Spy blows Oakley away in design. There will be no happy ending for Oakley.

The Oakley CEO dude isn’t going to take it lying down. I hear he can pedal his bike all the way around the block now without getting too winded, as long as there’s a plate of cheeseburgers at the end to refuel the machine.